A pop a day keeps boredom away!

In our house, we’re big fans of freeze-dried fruit. It’s crunchy, portable and sweet, so it’s the perfect snack for little kids. My only real gripe with it is that most fruits taste kind of the same once you remove their water (honestly — taste a freeze dried apple and a freeze dried pear and tell me if you can really taste a difference).

But trolling around Trader Joe’s the other day, I came across something different — freeze-dried oranges! I had to try them, of course. After that, it was only a matter of time (one day, actually) before I tried using them in an ice pop.

I have used citrus fruit to decorate ice pops before, with decent results. However, I’ve never gotten that really nice, translucent look that you can see on the Zoku box. I hoped maybe these would do it.

I dampened the orange pieces with a little of the lemonade and stuck them to the walls of the mold with a knife. Once the lemonade froze, I pulled the pop out with great anticipation:

Whanh, whanh, whanh.

Ok, so looks-wise, these were a dud. The oranges were completely obscured by the lemonade. Taste wise, however, these were an unexpected hit. I thought maybe the oranges would rehydrate a little and get sticky, but they didn’t — they added a nice, airy crisp to the ice pop, as well as a great burst of flavor. They made an otherwise humdrum lemonade pop into something very different and very interesting.